Posts mit dem Label textilgeschickte werden angezeigt. Alle Posts anzeigen
Posts mit dem Label textilgeschickte werden angezeigt. Alle Posts anzeigen
29.11.2016
12.10.2016
Ann Hamilton Pays Tribute to Philadelphia’s Frayed Textile Industry
Ann Hamilton, ‘habitus’ (2016), installation view at Municipal Pier 9 (all photos by Thibault Jeanson, courtesy the Fabric Workshop and Museum)
PHILADELPHIA — Started around 1907, Municipal Pier 9was built as part of a comprehensive plan to upgrade the Delaware River as a shipping channel. Intended to resemble (and rival) Chelsea Piers in New York City, these buildings were designed to accommodate larger cargo ships and it was hoped that they would help rejuvenate the waterfront area, making it once again a competitive port for international trade and commerce. From roughly 1880 to 1920, Philadelphia’s industrial district supported an array of mills and plants and no other city produced a wider range of textile products. At the turn of the 20th century, there were close to 700 textile companies operating in the area, creating everything from yarn, rope, ribbons, and lace to silk stockings, upholstery, and military cloths. Yet the area’s textile industry declined after the 1920s, and the trade activities at the ports began to suffer in turn. While other similar building sites have been turned into condos, Pier 9 was until recently used as a storage facility and it retains vestiges of its previous life: a railway track bisects the interior and metal covers lift to reveal large portals that open directly onto the river — it is as if the space was patiently waiting, still ready to receive cargo.
Ann Hamilton, ‘habitus’ (2016), installation view at Municipal Pier 9
This pier is the setting for Ann Hamilton’s latest installation, habitus, made in collaboration with Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, where a companion display fills three floors of exhibition space. Cloth and the history of textile production in the city form the foundation of both parts of Hamilton’s project. At Pier 9, the former space of bustling trade is filled with 12 spectral, spinning curtains that hang from the steel beams and girders that crisscross the ceiling. Next to each curtain are two thick ropes — made from a twist of linen and wool — that are attached to a pulley system. These ropes activate the installation when the visitor pulls them: the fabric forms begin to spin, slowly, and some emit the humming wheeze of an accordion or the ringing of bells. Made from Tyvek, the curtains have been dyed, as the artist says, to match the atmosphere, in shades of soft gray-blue. Gathered and draped in billowing furls, the fabric falls some 30 to 40 feet from the steel beams to just above the compact and uneven dirt floor. The draped fabric looks somewhat like the over-fussy curtains of a stately home, the kind you would like to hide behind, or even the full dress of a fine lady, who has gathered up her skirts and lifted them, too high to be dainty.
Ann Hamilton, ‘habitus’ (2016), installation view at Municipal Pier 9
30.09.2015
Subject: The Fabric of India opens
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18.09.2015
The Influence of ‘Foreignness’: How Immigration and Imported Commodities affected England’s Cloth Industries and Consumer Habits, 1685-1755
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| http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/5590 |
Glossary
Terms that appear in the text without explanation
Alamode a thin, lightweight, glossy silk used for scarves and hoods
Batiste a fine, even weaved linen. Also known as Cambric (the synonym of the French word)
Bizarre a figured silk fabric, characterized by large-scale, asymmetrical patterns
Bombazine dress material entirely of silk, later of silk and cotton
Calendering the glazed finish given to calicoes
Callicoe (Calico) a plain cotton which could be and often was printed
Chintz From the Hindi word chint, meaning variegated. A printed or painted calico. A glazed printed cotton (the glaze perhaps not visible today) distinguished in the mid eighteenth century as a cotton printed with five or more colours, the pattern a little larger than usual and very colourful
Damask a reversible figured fabric of silk, with a pattern formed by weaving
Dimity a fine cotton, usually white, with a raised woven design, also white
Flower’d (Flowered) was the generic term for a free pattern, since at this period such patterns were always composed from flowers. The weavers of ‘flowered’ silks formed a distinct branch of the industry. The same terminology was carried across to the newer calico-printing industry
Holland became the generic term for a fine linen cloth
Lawn/Long lawn a very fine linen. The term has not changed its meaning. ‘Long’ lawn may refer to the length of the piece in which it was woven
Lorettos a silk material used for waistcoats
Lustring a soft silk which might be either plain or flowered
Muslin a general name for the most delicately woven cotton fabrics
Paduasway (Paduasoy) an expensive, heavy, strong silk, often patterned or figured, made from the best quality silk.
Persian a thin soft silk used most often for linings
Sarsenet a very fine and soft silk material made both plain and twilled in various colors and used especially for linings and ribbons.
Sateen: a cotton imitation of satin 5
Satin a silk fabric with a glossy surface
Taffeties a light thin silk of high luster used especially as a dress fabric
Tambour embroidery using a basic chain stitch on the top of the fabric, using a specially made tambour needle
Throwster a person involved in the process where silk that has been reeled into skeins, is cleaned, receives a twist and is wound onto bobbins.
A Fashion for Abolition
www.common-place.org · vol. 14 · no. 1 · Fall 2013
Cybèle T. Gontar is a PhD candidate in American art at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has written for the Metropolitan Museum Journal, The Magazine Antiques, andCommon-place.
Cybèle T. Gontar
A Fashion for Abolition
Frédéric Etienne Joseph Feldtrappe's Traite des Nègres (ca. 1825)
Introduction
Today a gallery of the Nantes History Museum's Château des Ducs de Bretagne relates information about the transatlantic slave trade. Within stands a lit à la Duchesse, whose faded but once stylish toile ensemble reveals striking antislavery graphics (figs. 1, 2). One scene bears the title "Traite des Nègres"—Slave Trade—on a wooden sign printed in repeat across the fabric.
Toile, short for toile de Jouy (after the Oberkampf factory in Jouy-en-Josas, France), is cotton, linen, or silk printed with monochromatic scenes, often dyed in red, blue, or black. The word "toile," meaning cloth, derives from the Latin root tela, or web—an apt metaphor for the network of painters, engravers, and printmakers linked through Traite des Nègres. For example, while signed "E. Feldtrappe," Traite's scenery reflects contributions by six French and British artists inspired by the cause of abolition. Feldtrappe's cloth (circa 1825) re-disseminated imagery from late eighteenth-century abolitionist prints, underscoring their currency well into the nineteenth century as slavery persisted.
Seemingly deemphasized by their use for decorative upholstery patterns, Traite's vignettes, in fact, would have been difficult to miss, especially when draping windows or objects of repose, and hence viewed at close range. While private today, bedrooms were semi-public spaces for centuries, and bed draperies were among the most expensive and prestigious household possessions. Politically commemorative toiles were au courant material for entertainment and stimulating discussion within the personal yet open setting of the nineteenth-century bedchamber or parlor. Traite was printed to promote abolition, despite its inevitable use in households made wealthy by the trafficking it denounced.Made near Rouen, part of France's commercial slave-trading center, Traite is a symbol of the Atlantic world in which slaves labored over and were physically bartered for cotton.
This article will discuss how Traite des Nègres came to be produced, and will consider its use, meaning, and relationship to antislavery activity and related artworks. As will be shown, the cloth's scenes blend French, British, and American abolitionist expressions, characterized by Enlightenment ideals, romantic themes, and moralizing sentiment. Made near Rouen, part of France's commercial slave-trading center, Traite is a symbol of the Atlantic world in which slaves labored over and were physically bartered for cotton. Further, it is a material fragment of a vast global cloth trade—identified by Giorgio Riello as the effect of a progressive shift in the textile-manufacturing core from Asia to Europe, spurred by industrialization in France and Britain.
Traite, together with its sources, represents the interrelationship of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century textile and slave trades with colonial racial identity and experience in Europe, Africa, and America. While its use is yet undocumented in North America, surviving mulberry-on-white lengths have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, with a saffron-colored remnant at the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum. Other samples exist in at least seven other collections outside the United States, confirming the cloth's popularity and the quantity of its manufacture. While the only known "furniture cotton" devoted to abolition motifs, Traite des Nègres is akin to other historic toiles celebrating liberty, some manufactured for a post-Revolutionary American market. For example, L'Hommage de l'Amerique à la France ("America's homage to France," produced by Oberkampf around 1780) includes a kneeling slave holding up a leaflet before an allegorical figure of France.
1. Lit à la Duchesse (cherry wood) with Traite des Nègres hangings (ca. 1825) by Frédéric Etienne Joseph Feldtrappe (French, 1786-1849), signed "E. Feldtrappe"; roller-printed cotton, probably Canteleu or Manufacture Girard à Déville-lès-Rouen (Normandy). Bed: 46.2 x 48.2 x 47 in.; canopy is suspended 8.75 ft. © Château des Ducs de Bretagne—Musée d'histoire de Nantes, photo by Alain Guillard.
2. Detail of Traite des Nègres, ca. 1825, Frédéric Etienne Joseph Feldtrappe (French, 1786-1849), mulberry-on-white roller-printed cotton signed "E. Feldtrappe," 101 x 33 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund. Image source: Art Resource, New York. Click image to see full length of cloth in a new window.
Traite des Nègres
Read clockwise,Traite's four interlocking scenes begin in an Edenic Africa before the arrival of trade-seeking Europeans. Kind-hearted Africans rescue shipwrecked voyagers from drowning. Yet in the final scene, the welcomed Europeans (and a complicit African) have been transformed into brutal slave traders, one with a bludgeon and another with a branding iron at his feet. A native man is torn from his family, and another sits shackled in a rowboat. The menacing slave trader—an unlikely subject for bed linens—is included in other abolition-inspired stories and images. A figure with upraised baton is seen in Samuel Wood's 1805 broadside Injured Humanity, and in Charles-Émile Jacque's Un planteur entêté (An obstinate planter), ca. 1830, from La Caricature, a Parisian satirical magazine (figs. 3, 4). L'Histoire de Paul et Virginie, the iconic novel of 1788 by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre set on the island of Mauritius, describes a confrontation with a cruel slave master. This scene was reproduced on fashionable Paul et Virginie toiles, including one designed by Favre, Petitpierre et Cie of Nantes, ca. 1795. But how did the printing of such scenery on furnishing fabrics come about?
The seventeenth-century "calico craze" for brightly colored, painted, and printed Indian cottons, exported mainly via the British East India Company, led to competitive embargoes in France. Resulting import substitution practices were also banned until 1759. An indienne (meaning "Indian") was a French fabric designed in emulation of the restricted fabrics. They were known also as toiles peints, or "painted cottons." Though prohibited, l'indiennage continued apace in Marseilles, Rouen, Nantes, and elsewhere in France.
Cybèle T. Gontar is a PhD candidate in American art at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has written for the Metropolitan Museum Journal, The Magazine Antiques, andCommon-place.
Cybèle T. Gontar
A Fashion for Abolition
Frédéric Etienne Joseph Feldtrappe's Traite des Nègres (ca. 1825)
Introduction
Today a gallery of the Nantes History Museum's Château des Ducs de Bretagne relates information about the transatlantic slave trade. Within stands a lit à la Duchesse, whose faded but once stylish toile ensemble reveals striking antislavery graphics (figs. 1, 2). One scene bears the title "Traite des Nègres"—Slave Trade—on a wooden sign printed in repeat across the fabric.
Toile, short for toile de Jouy (after the Oberkampf factory in Jouy-en-Josas, France), is cotton, linen, or silk printed with monochromatic scenes, often dyed in red, blue, or black. The word "toile," meaning cloth, derives from the Latin root tela, or web—an apt metaphor for the network of painters, engravers, and printmakers linked through Traite des Nègres. For example, while signed "E. Feldtrappe," Traite's scenery reflects contributions by six French and British artists inspired by the cause of abolition. Feldtrappe's cloth (circa 1825) re-disseminated imagery from late eighteenth-century abolitionist prints, underscoring their currency well into the nineteenth century as slavery persisted.
Seemingly deemphasized by their use for decorative upholstery patterns, Traite's vignettes, in fact, would have been difficult to miss, especially when draping windows or objects of repose, and hence viewed at close range. While private today, bedrooms were semi-public spaces for centuries, and bed draperies were among the most expensive and prestigious household possessions. Politically commemorative toiles were au courant material for entertainment and stimulating discussion within the personal yet open setting of the nineteenth-century bedchamber or parlor. Traite was printed to promote abolition, despite its inevitable use in households made wealthy by the trafficking it denounced.Made near Rouen, part of France's commercial slave-trading center, Traite is a symbol of the Atlantic world in which slaves labored over and were physically bartered for cotton.
This article will discuss how Traite des Nègres came to be produced, and will consider its use, meaning, and relationship to antislavery activity and related artworks. As will be shown, the cloth's scenes blend French, British, and American abolitionist expressions, characterized by Enlightenment ideals, romantic themes, and moralizing sentiment. Made near Rouen, part of France's commercial slave-trading center, Traite is a symbol of the Atlantic world in which slaves labored over and were physically bartered for cotton. Further, it is a material fragment of a vast global cloth trade—identified by Giorgio Riello as the effect of a progressive shift in the textile-manufacturing core from Asia to Europe, spurred by industrialization in France and Britain.
Traite, together with its sources, represents the interrelationship of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century textile and slave trades with colonial racial identity and experience in Europe, Africa, and America. While its use is yet undocumented in North America, surviving mulberry-on-white lengths have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, with a saffron-colored remnant at the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum. Other samples exist in at least seven other collections outside the United States, confirming the cloth's popularity and the quantity of its manufacture. While the only known "furniture cotton" devoted to abolition motifs, Traite des Nègres is akin to other historic toiles celebrating liberty, some manufactured for a post-Revolutionary American market. For example, L'Hommage de l'Amerique à la France ("America's homage to France," produced by Oberkampf around 1780) includes a kneeling slave holding up a leaflet before an allegorical figure of France.
1. Lit à la Duchesse (cherry wood) with Traite des Nègres hangings (ca. 1825) by Frédéric Etienne Joseph Feldtrappe (French, 1786-1849), signed "E. Feldtrappe"; roller-printed cotton, probably Canteleu or Manufacture Girard à Déville-lès-Rouen (Normandy). Bed: 46.2 x 48.2 x 47 in.; canopy is suspended 8.75 ft. © Château des Ducs de Bretagne—Musée d'histoire de Nantes, photo by Alain Guillard.
Traite des Nègres
Read clockwise,Traite's four interlocking scenes begin in an Edenic Africa before the arrival of trade-seeking Europeans. Kind-hearted Africans rescue shipwrecked voyagers from drowning. Yet in the final scene, the welcomed Europeans (and a complicit African) have been transformed into brutal slave traders, one with a bludgeon and another with a branding iron at his feet. A native man is torn from his family, and another sits shackled in a rowboat. The menacing slave trader—an unlikely subject for bed linens—is included in other abolition-inspired stories and images. A figure with upraised baton is seen in Samuel Wood's 1805 broadside Injured Humanity, and in Charles-Émile Jacque's Un planteur entêté (An obstinate planter), ca. 1830, from La Caricature, a Parisian satirical magazine (figs. 3, 4). L'Histoire de Paul et Virginie, the iconic novel of 1788 by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre set on the island of Mauritius, describes a confrontation with a cruel slave master. This scene was reproduced on fashionable Paul et Virginie toiles, including one designed by Favre, Petitpierre et Cie of Nantes, ca. 1795. But how did the printing of such scenery on furnishing fabrics come about?
The seventeenth-century "calico craze" for brightly colored, painted, and printed Indian cottons, exported mainly via the British East India Company, led to competitive embargoes in France. Resulting import substitution practices were also banned until 1759. An indienne (meaning "Indian") was a French fabric designed in emulation of the restricted fabrics. They were known also as toiles peints, or "painted cottons." Though prohibited, l'indiennage continued apace in Marseilles, Rouen, Nantes, and elsewhere in France.
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